X and Meta: Who’s benefiting from Tiktok’s brief hiatus?
As Tiktok temporarily went down on Sunday afternoon, rival social media platforms such as X and Meta scrambled to fill the void left by the app’s absence.
Several competitors moved quickly to capitalise on its downfall, hoping to attract its 170m US user base by picking up its various features.
Before the ban took effect on Sunday, Tiktok creators and users migrated to Rednote, a competing video app that gained 700,000 new users in just two days.
Yet, as the Chinese-owned app went dark, industry giants Meta and X also jumped into the fray, introducing new tools to capitalise on Tiktok’s troubles.
X’s new features
Elon Musks’s X announced the rollout of a video tab for its US users, offering short-form, Tiktok-length content on their feeds as the Chinese-owned social media platform navigated hot waters.
The company posted on its own platform on Sunday: “An immersive new home for videos is rolling out to users in the US today.”
Yet, users in the comments were quick to point out the lack of robust editing tools that TikTok had made essential for its content creators.
Yet, self-ascribed “TikTok refugees” praised Musk’s new feature for its similar format.
Meta’s ‘Edits’
Similarly, Mark Zuckerberg introduced a standalone app over the weekend: Edits.
Announced by Instagram chief Adam Mosseri, the app is designed to help creators make professional videos directly from their phones, much like the editing software on TikTok.
The app perhaps mirrors Capcut more accurately, another editing tool previously owned by Bytedance, Tiktok’s parent company.
Tiktok bounces back
The Chinese firm was shut down in the US following a Supreme Court decision to uphold a law banning ByteDance services over national security and data concerns.
However, President Donald Trump pledged to pause the ban upon taking office, while Bytedance announced it was working to reinstate TikTok access, the future of the app remains unclear.